City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp

"This is a book about the world’s largest refugee camp, Dadaab. It’s a camp of about 350,000 people in eastern Kenya, full of Somali refugees. It’s been there for thirty years. It’s a tale of nine visits to the camp. Although most refugees are in urban areas, long-term refugee status is often associated with refugee camps. This is the world’s largest one and it shows the problems. The camp, which is set up for a short-term respite, when it becomes a long-term city, has massive problems associated with it. It shows the economy, the insecurity, the hopelessness, the cruelty, the kindness that arises when you put 350,000 people together. It also describes some of the relationships between the camp dwellers and Kenyan society. The last Kenyan election, in some ways, focused on what to do with Somali refugees. The book takes in those bigger political questions, which exist in Western societies as well as developing countries, and balances them with the real day-to-day struggle for survival in refugee camps. Since most refugees live in urban areas, they are not a captive audience for social services, for health services for educational services. And so the challenges are finding people, sheltering them, stopping them from being abused (there is abuse in refugee camps but there are different people preying on them). There is an obvious potential upside, which is that in urban areas there is a chance for refugees to become economically independent, if the local laws allow them to work. So that’s the essential issue."

"Yes. It’s about the Dadaab refugee camp, the biggest refugee camp in the world, on Kenya’s border with Somalia. I guess you occasionally hear about this camp in the media. Sometimes it’s described as an incubator of terrorism, or discussed as one of those big international problems. It started decades ago and basically functions as a city, but its people are trapped there in this miserable limbo. Ben Rawlence worked for a human rights NGO before he became a writer. He spent a lot of time there, and here he focuses on several young people and tells their stories in granular detail. What I really love about the book is that it’s an account of how people form and continue their lives in the most extreme and challenging circumstances; people cling to these bits of normality and construct a life that, although so different to that of the reader’s, you can recognise – their aspirations and goals and desire for an education or good job or love, or whatever it is. I find something very appealing about that; the bravery of finding a semblance of normality in these extreme situations. Ultimately, it’s a sad story. Because it’s a story of limbo, of being forgotten by the international community, and their lives blighted by political stasis on refugees. But you find yourself so invested in these lives. So often, refugees’ lives are talked about in a very particular way, a politicised way, and not given this kind of attention. So I think it’s very powerful. Though there’s a kind of hopelessness, the book gets a real shape and momentum by occasionally stepping back and talking about the wider political picture—Kenya’s clashes with Somalia, al Shabaab attacks in Kenya, or the UN’s and other international organisations’ repeated inaction. You get a sense of what’s happening at the macro level, but what sticks with you is the determination of the people who live there to carry on."